30 Reasons To Hate The Oscars

Oscars Every year, someone spends hours coming up with an articulate explanation for why they hate the Oscars, and everyone rolls their eyes, tuts and tunes in to the annual ceremony anyway. It's all just empty bluster after all - the moans of an entitled few who think they know better? Well, no quite frankly. Every year the Academy gives us further reasons not to pay attention to their opinions, making something of a mockery of their status as the biggest event on the film calendar, and yet we all still sit up with our popcorn to watch who they have chosen to tell us are the best talents and films of the year. This isn't an exercise in shallow Academy bashing, and to prove it, we've come up with 30 reasons you should hate the Oscars...

30. Manipulating The Best Director Category

steven-spielberg-black-and-withe1 Every single Oscar year ends up being discussed more in terms of who was snubbed rather than who triumphed on the night - chiefly because we're all more attracted to the cause of the loser and any opportunity to whinge is invariably grasped with both hands. But this year, it looks very much like two snubs in particular were engineered in order to allow two American institutions to triumph in the biggest categories of the night. Both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo deserve to be up for Best Film undoubtedly, but both would probably have been overlooked for Lincoln, because of the nature of the beast - and not too many people would have been too bothered. But the fact that the Academy appears to have purposefully snubbed both of those films' directors for the Directorial Achievement award is more difficult to accept, as it looks an awful lot like they're manipulating the ballot to allow Steven Spielberg and Lincoln to triumph on both fronts. Lincoln is a worthy film, but Ben Affleck or Katheryn Bigelow would have been just as worthy a directorial win as Spielberg, and now it looks like he has a free run at the award. He will deserve it on merit of course, but the circumstances will now take some shine off that win for some, if it does happen as expected.

29. The Oscar Curse

halleberry-catwoman If you're an actor up for a big gong at the Oscars, there must be a tiny part of the back of your mind screaming that victory might mean never working again, or at least making the kind of monumentally stupid decisions that Cuba Gooding Jnr and Halle Berry both made in the wake of their big wins. And those two aren't the only ones - there's a long and colourful history of actors supposedly suffering the Oscar curse, and it doesn't look like it's going to end any time soon.

28. Snubbing Leonardo DiCaprio

DiCaprio Calvin Candie is Tarantino's greatest villain - by the director's own assertion - and he is also arguably Leo DiCaprio's finest performance. Yes, he was great in Inception and Shutter Island, but he plays heroes easily, and his viscerally affecting performance as the malignant Candie is a finer performance than either of them. To be fair to DiCaprio, the Oscars clearly hate him, but this role should have been recognised with the praise it definitely deserves. The Academy actually have previous form in recognising the wrong Tarantino achievements. Inglourious Basterds was great, and it was an enormously fun experience, and Django Unchained was very good in places and featured some exceptional acting performances (more of which soon), but were either of them really better than Jackie Brown or Reservoir Dogs?

27. Hating James Bond

James Bond No amount of dedicating the ceremony to the British spy character will gloss over the fact that major awards ceremonies hate James Bond - and that includes the BAFTAs, where he should be heralded as a British institution. For 50 years, Bond has brought millions of dollars to the box office, attracting critical acclaim along the way - though not all the time - and consistently putting audiences in seats, even if the franchise appears to be sneered upon by the snobs, who prefer to look at the mechanics of franchises, rather than the quality of this one specifically. Skyfall's snub for Best Film this year - a nomination that should have come without question - was just the latest in a long line of unjustified snubs. Over fifty years, Bond has received just 14 nominations, mostly for songs, and two wins, and you really have to judge any awards body that can't see beyond the nature of the property (see also: animations, mo-cap and trilogies) to recognise the quality of single films.

26. Randy Newman: 20 Nominations, 2 Wins?!

Randy Newman It took the Academy 20 years and 16 nominations to finally give Randy Newman the Oscar he deserved for Monsters Inc's "If I Didn't Have You," and he is the most unjustly snubbed Hollywood talent in history, despite what others might think. Yes, he's now won two, and that's a wonderful achievement, but a 10% win rate is just not right, especially when you consider that he somehow didn't win for the brilliant, and emotionally devastating "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2. Ridiculous
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